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As 2012 Elections Loom, Partisans on Both Sides Argue the Effect of Voter-ID Laws on Students

By  Molly Redden
July 11, 2011

For groups whose mission it is to energize young voters, Wisconsin used to be the gold standard.

With no special hurdles to clear and voter-friendly practices, like Election Day registration, the state was frequently cited as one of the easiest places for students new to the state to register and vote. By no coincidence, activists argued, Wisconsin was nearly top in youth-voter turnout for both the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.

But before next year’s primary election, a Wisconsin law will go into effect that will require voters to show proof of identity with government-issued photo identification. And Wisconsin is only one of a slew of states where legislators have recently weighed bills that tighten voting requirements. This legislative season, lawmakers in at least 34 states introduced bills that would require a photo ID for voting, said Keesha Gaskins, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.

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For groups whose mission it is to energize young voters, Wisconsin used to be the gold standard.

With no special hurdles to clear and voter-friendly practices, like Election Day registration, the state was frequently cited as one of the easiest places for students new to the state to register and vote. By no coincidence, activists argued, Wisconsin was nearly top in youth-voter turnout for both the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.

But before next year’s primary election, a Wisconsin law will go into effect that will require voters to show proof of identity with government-issued photo identification. And Wisconsin is only one of a slew of states where legislators have recently weighed bills that tighten voting requirements. This legislative season, lawmakers in at least 34 states introduced bills that would require a photo ID for voting, said Keesha Gaskins, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Lawmakers in most of those states have said they simply want to prevent voter fraud. Whatever the case, partisans on both sides are debating the potential effect on students’ power at the polls and on the 2012 president election in general.

At a recent Campus Progress panel on youth voting, representatives from organizations like Rock the Vote and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or Circle, said the new laws conveyed clearly that the youth vote is under attack. Most of the bills have heavy Republican backing, and Democratic groups claim that the legislation is intended to winnow the left’s traditional base of voters—such as young voters—who are less likely to have government-issued ID’s than the Republican electorate. At the Campus Progress panel, Eric Marshall, the manager of legal mobilization for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, compared the new restrictions to the Jim Crow laws states historically enacted to undermine blacks’ right to vote. “We consider photo ID a modern-day poll tax” targeting students, he said.

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As an example, he pointed out that, although the final version of the Wisconsin bill made a provision for student ID’s, none of the 182,000 students enrolled in Wisconsin colleges has one that meets all the requirements. The University of Wisconsin system projected it would cost $1.1-million to alter its student ID’s to meet the regulations—to display the student’s photo and address, and to include a two-year expiration date. If a student did not have another form of ID, like a driver’s license or passport, found it too hard to get an ID, or didn’t realize he needed one, Mr. Marshall said, he could be out of luck.

But identifying how many college-going students are among the voters likely to be affected by those laws can be tricky. Statistics show that voting-age citizens who lack government-issued photo ID’s broadly belong to disadvantaged groups, which do not always make up a large portion of a state’s college population.

“There’s a huge gap in the research right now” concerning how many college students lack the proper identification to register to vote, admits Abby I. Kiesa, the youth coordinator for Circle. But, she wrote in an e-mail, “regardless of the effects of voter-ID laws on turnout, we think that more youth participating is better, and putting obstacles in the way of this is unconscionable.”

‘Apocalyptic Assertions’

The argument is galvanizing both parties, particularly as more states enact stricter voter-ID laws.

Since the end of 2010, Mr. Marshall said, the number of states requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls has grown from two to eight. Through legislation or veto-overrides, several states, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Carolina, have the potential to join that list before the 2012 election cycle begins.

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Few proponents are arguing for the bills on the basis that they will disenfranchise students. Most, like Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, have argued that voter-ID laws are necessary to counteract voter fraud.

“The numbers do not in any way support the thesis that these kinds of laws depress turnouts,” von Spakovsky said. Although he could not speak to college-going voters in particular, von Spakovsky said statistics disprove Democrats’ arguments. In Georgia, where one of the strictest voter-ID laws in the country went into effect in 2007, Democratic turnout was up 6.4 percent in 2008—the fifth-largest increase in the country. He also cited a 2006 court case in which the presiding judge chastised the Indiana Democratic Party, which was challenging the state’s strict photo-ID law, for failing to produce any voters whom the law disenfranchised, despite “apocalyptic assertions of wholesale voter disenfranchisement.”

At the Campus Progress event, panelists offered the typical Democratic responses: Courts these days are overwhelmingly conservative; academics and attorneys general alike are hard pressed to find widespread cases of voter fraud—even J.B. Van Hollen, Wisconsin’s Republican attorney general, who led a determined investigation into allegations of voter fraud in the 2008 elections. (He found 20 instances in the whole state).

As evidence of Republicans’ deeper motive, Heather Smith, the president of Rock the Vote, pointed to a video taken of William O’Brien, the Republican speaker of the House in New Hampshire, complaining at a Tea Party event that “foolish” students, who have no “life experiences” and “just vote their feelings,” were flooding New Hampshire elections with liberal votes. “That’s what kids do,” he said.

Republicans in New Hampshire had introduced legislation that would bar students from voting in their college towns unless their parents had established residency there. The bill failed.

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Jennie D. Bowser, a senior fellow at the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, agreed that the kind of voter fraud that photo-ID laws can prevent occurs rarely. But Ms. Bowser also said the effects of photo-ID laws are just not clear yet. Few laws have been on the books long enough for their effects to be definitively measured, she said, adding that 2008 numbers mostly reflect the excitement surrounding the presidential elections.

“It’s an argument that’s happening without a whole lot of evidence on either side,” she said.

Other Hurdles

Other barriers may stand in the way of student voters come 2012. Mr. Marshall mentioned the rollback of Election Day registration in some states, which helped student voters who were out of state when earlier registration deadlines passed, as a complement to voter-ID laws. Being in college is itself a perennial barrier to voting. A Circle analysis of a U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey found that 28.9 percent of college students who did not register to vote in the 2008 presidential elections did not do so because they missed the registration deadline. Of college students ages 18 to 24 who did not vote in that year, 24.6 percent said that they couldn’t because they were “out of town or away from home,” and 9.4 percent could not because they didn’t receive an absentee ballot or were not registered where they were presently living.

In an e-mail, Mr. Marshall said a new law in Florida that regulates registration drives “is so ambiguous that a strict interpretation means that if a Floridian offers to pick up a voter registration form for her neighbor, she must register as a third-party registration group.” Ohio, Mr. Marshall wrote, has narrowed the window for early and absentee voting and eliminated other measures that helped reduce lines at polling places in the past. The new regulations could lead to a repeat of 2004, when Kenyon College students endured infamous wait times to cast their ballots.

Mr. Marshall’s organization, the Lawyers’ Committee, is still exploring ways to legally challenge the ID laws, but the U.S. Supreme Court and several lower courts have consistently upheld photo-ID legislation.

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Campus Progress panelists posed photo-ID laws as the new paradigm that student voters, and their colleges, would simply have to challenge. “If communities are rejecting students,” Ms. Kiesa said, “why isn’t their institution standing up for them?”

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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